Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8077429" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've never read Elric but have a reasonable familiarity with the basic ideas and tropes. I've never read Leiber either but have a passing familiarity with the basic ideas and tropes. Perhaps wrongly, I think of the City/Town Encounter Matrix in Appendix D of Gygax's DMG as something of a homage to Lankhmar.The parallels between Iuz/Celene and LotR are not very deep - they don't go below the level of basic trope resemblance. On the whole I think it's fair to say that the history of GH, as presented by Gygax, has no real moral depth. Which is a resemblance to REH's Hyborian Age essay, I guess!In my view the single best of REH's Conan stories is The Tower of the Elephant. Other classics are The Phoenix on the Sword, The God in the Bowl, The People of the Black Circle, Black Colossus and The Scarlet Citadel. Queen of the Black Coast is well-regarded but you have to do more work to ignore the racism. I prefer Xuthal of the Dark to Red Nails but that's probably a minority opinion. I'm not a big fan of Beyond the Black River but many regard it as a classic. The Hour of the Dragon is longer but fun. I think most of these, maybe all, are available online via Project Gutenberg Australia.I don't think that Sword and Sorcery has to be amoral, and so I don't think that GH has to be amoral. REH's Conan stories are not about an amoral protagonist. But the morality is brought by the protagonist - the protagonist does not learn or absorb the moraity from the metaphysics of the world. Those metaphysics are nihilistic, which is a point of similarity between REH and HPL.The biggest obstacle to doing straight S&S in a GH game, in my view, is that there are too many clerics and paladins. Even before we get to Veluna and Furyondy, the setting is rife with them. I think a version of GH using 4e mechanics (confined to Heroic and low Paragon) with no clerics or paladins but using invokers and warlords in their place, as well as wizards and warlocks and bards, could pretty easily fit the existing published material, especially the Gygax-era material, and deliver a solid S&S experience.At the moment I'm a player and a GM of ongoing, though intermittent, BW games set in GH. <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.673872/" target="_blank">I played a few weeks ago</a>, with the setting being the Ulek-Pomarj border. But it's not S&S - my PC is a Faithful knight of a holy military order - in D&D terms, a paladin - though of an order not found in canonical GH (The Knights of the Iron Tower). This has no trouble at all fitting into GH and its tropes and maps, but isn't S&S.</blockquote>

Verification